


Garden of Forking Paths

by Karios



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-11 19:01:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19546708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/pseuds/Karios
Summary: Eventually, Jean-Luc retires. Q objects. Somehow, it works for both of them.





	Garden of Forking Paths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oneiriad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneiriad/gifts).



> Many thanks to phnelt for looking this over!

There comes a time when even the great Jean-Luc Picard must acknowledge that these are his twilight years. He takes no shame in this awareness, in gently bending to the natural order of all things. He settles down among the grapes—his work behind him, his legacy secure, his victories well-marked.

He plans, finally, to read and to rest and to examine the universe and his place in it from the comfort of his own mind. Many great thinkers have suggested it. A time of quiet contemplation at the close of life.

It should be splendid, and yet.

He is terribly bored.

"I should get a pet," he mutters to himself, marking a low point. Perhaps an unwanted senior dog or other such companion animal. He's not really certain what's available these days. Whatever it is, he will be certain the creature is past its prime, so that he or she might understand him.

In retrospect, Jean-Luc is certain Q heard this errant thought about potential animal ownership, and like the vampires of ancient Earth literature, taken it as an invitation. An invitation to cross the invisible threshold that puts him back into Jean-Luc's life.

The metaphor is helped by the fact that, when Jean-Luc returns home from an afternoon spent painting, he finds Q cross-legged on the sofa, sipping a glass of blood-red wine.

"Mon Capitaine," he says brightly, waving Jean-Luc inside as though this were Q’s home and not the other way round.

"Q, what are you doing here?" he asks.

"You invited me," Q replies, smug as ever.

"I most certainly did not."

"Yes. You. Did." Q states each word emphatically enough to be individual sentence, not unlike a frustrated child and Jean-Luc is unsure what to say to that. So he opts to say nothing, instead trudging past Q to clean himself up and change as he had originally intended.

When he emerges, Q is still sitting there, though he can't say he had really expected otherwise. Still, Jean-Luc sighs.

"What are you still doing here, Q? Why are you sitting on my sofa, drinking my wine?" he grouses.

"As I told, you —"

"Invited you, yes." Jean-Luc finishes for him. "I meant," and he pauses there searching for a better version of his question. "I meant, what did you want, with me."

"I want to tell you a story."

Jean-Luc crosses over to sit in an armchair, wishing momentarily he'd thought to make a cup of tea first but quickly dismisses the thought. He waved Q on. "Proceed."

"That's it?" Q slumps visibly. "You're just agreeing?"

"Compared to the past, compared to what you have or might have chosen...putting me on trial, whisking me across the galaxies, life-threatening dangers of all sorts, a story is relatively harmless. So, proceed."

"True," Q agrees. He looks thoughtful for just a moment, then pops away, wine glass and all, without another word.

Jean-Luc pointedly decides not to examine why he's disappointed.

It is not the last he sees of Q, who shows up again just a few days later offering a story once more. Jean-Luc in a fouler mood than he had been before, and still perturbed by the events (or non event as it were) of a few days prior, asserts he is in no mood for a story or Q's company at all.

Q, in turn, insists he stay, and Jean-Luc is treated to a tale. About himself. Well, a version of himself at any rate. A Jean-Luc Picard who did not retire to a vineyard as this one has done.

Q drops in once every few days thereafter, at just haphazard enough a schedule to avoid anything that might foolishly seem like regularity. Most of the time, he brings another tale of another Jean-Luc Picard. Occasionally, he does not, and they sit and sip wine and discuss philosophy and literature as though they were friends or equals.

It's confusing, and just perhaps, pleasant. Jean-Luc finds himself looking forward to all of it.

Then, as is Q's wont, he changes the game, dropping Jean-Luc off in one of the other Jean-Lucs' lives. Leaving him to fumble around in it for days. He's not even playing at being the Jean-Luc from Q's most recent story, nor the furthest back, but one plucked seemingly at random.

When Q finally redeposits him back at home, Jean-Luc reflects he should have suspected that Q would do his best to disorient him.

When Q turns up again, Jean-Luc musters up old anger. "What do you think you're doing? Just dumping me off in an alternate reality like that."

"Not quite, Picard." He smiles. "It's just a story."

"Even so, I could have ruined things for that other Jean-Luc or for others he knows, my choices —"

"— Are meaningless. Your decisions worthless. You're playing around in a might-have-been. I can see hundreds, nay thousands, of them for you alone. And I can put you there," he declares with a snap of his fingers "and yank you out whenever."

"No," Jean Luc insists, "In that last visit, the ship's core was melting down. Lives were at stake."

"No more than they are in a dream. Or in one of your little Holodeck programs, the consequences seem real there too." Q shrugs. "It was meant to be fun."

Jean-Luc laughs. "Since when do you care whether I, whether anyone but you, is having fun?"

"Who says I'm not? Whoever said I didn't?" Q plopped down on Jean-Luc's sofa, stretches out. 

"Go," Jean-Luc points toward the door. "I've had quite enough."

"No." Q sticks his tongue out at him. 

"Suit yourself. I'm going to bed."

"That, Picard, is a wonderful idea."

A moment later, Jean-Luc finds himself in an unfamiliar bed with a wife he's never met. They pass ten days in domestic disharmony before Q dumps him unceremoniously on the floor of his vineyard cabin. Q is there, looking down at him.

"You're an ingrate," he informs Jean-Luc. "Unhappy with this life and equally displeased with dozens more."

Jean-Luc scrambles to his feet. "Was that the point of all this, a grand exercise to expose my ingratitude?"

"The point, Mon Capitaine, is that you were bored." He prods Jean-Luc in the chest as he says it, and Jean-Luc swats his hand away. For a second, they stand there, just looking at each other and breathing, and Jean-Luc swears Q looks ready to kiss him.

"Far too human a gesture," Q says as though he were answering his thoughts, which prompts Jean-Luc to consider what kind of gesture is appropriate for a Q. Giving someone dozens of lifetimes to run around in would seem to qualify.

It's the same kind of love as giving a hamster an exercise wheel, but then given the-Q-to-human scale he supposes that's a fair comparison.

All that remains then is how he feels about playing hamster to Q. Life is certainly less dull. And it is flattering, Jean-Luc supposes. Q, with all his powers and his options, the whole of the universes at his fingertips, has chosen him. They will stave off existential loneliness together. It feels unexpectedly right.

“What now, Picard?” Q asks.

“Have you ever read Borges? I think you’d like his work.”

“Oh, would I?”

Jean-Luc nods. “Let me open a bottle, and I'll tell you about him.”


End file.
